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Comment by DenisM | Hacker News Reader

Anyone who worked in tech support knows that users lie. Most often they don't know they lie, but if you have the log files you can clearly see what's going on.

I imagine anyone who works in law enforcement is also well aware of the fallibility of memory, they just don't bring it up in the court room.

At any rate, this is not a surprising news the article makes it out to be. Our memory is crap. Write things down if you want to be sure of them.

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I recommend the film Rashomon, one of my favorite explorations of the theme of fallible memory. Several observers all remember a scene completely differently, and the film shows each version in turn, without offering any way to tell whether any is more true than another.

Also, Memento is a great mind-bender, if you think writing things down makes anyone sure of anything.

I felt that the interesting bit of rashmon is that you don't know how much of each alteration is intentional or not.

Even writing stuff down is oddly fallible because a lot of thoughts and memories don't really translate into written word very well - and even if they seem to at the time of writing, reading those words later can cause an entirely different impression to form in the minds of different people (including your own). Our ability to really communicate in any accurate way is surprisingly bad. It's kind of amazing we've achieved all that we have with such a lossy storage system, IMO.

I imagine anyone who works in law enforcement is also well aware of the fallibility of memory, they just don't bring it up in the court room.

Anyone who has had work responsibilities including reading trial transcripts, as I have, knows that people will report under oath, subject to cross-examination, all kinds of memories that can't possibly be true. The finder of fact has to figure whom to believe, if anyone.

I imagine anyone who works in law enforcement is also well aware of the fallibility of memory, they just don't bring it up in the court room.

Nope, they leave that to the lawyers.

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